Obama's Outreach To Muslims Won't Achieve Its Goal

By David Satter

The decision by President Obama to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and open a dialogue with the Muslim world is unlikely to achieve its principal objective, which is to undermine the appeal of al-Qaida. The reason for this is that attacks like Sept. 11, 2001, spring from deep spiritual causes and are not the result of American political behavior.

In his interview with the Arabic television station, al Arabiya, Obama missed the moral dimension of the struggle with terrorism completely. He said that the U.S. has "not been perfect" in its dealings with the Arab world (who has?) and all too often started off by dictating.

At times, he said, we did not know all the factors that were involved in the area's conflicts. In other words, our actions have, in part, led to the hostility against us, but we are ready to improve. Why, as the victims of terrorism, it was up to us to improve was not explained.

Obama's remarks may change the image of America in the Muslim world temporarily. In the long run, however, his approach is self-defeating. First, it concedes the question of moral legitimacy and so implicitly justifies the murderous behavior that we are trying to restrain.

At the same time, by concentrating on America's image, it attaches far too much importance to the mood of the Arab street, rendering U.S. policy dependent on their judgment rather than ours. Finally, it disparages the achievements of the previous administration in strengthening American security, creating the dangerous impression that the Obama administration may not be committed to defending them.

It would have been much better if, in considering his approach to the Muslim world, Obama had taken into account the lessons of a hundred years of experience in combating totalitarianism, which show that fighting fanaticism with political concessions does not work but other methods can. Successful methods include military success and discrediting the school of thought of the fanatic at its most fundamental level.

All totalitarian movements treat their eventual triumph as inevitable. As a result, any military defeat fatally undermines their credibility. In 1983, the U.S. successfully invaded Grenada, an island of 100,000 people. The invasion was treated with ridicule by large sections of the Western public. But this was the first time that an established communist government had ever been overthrown. The communist defeat in Grenada was followed by defeats in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

In recent months, we have witnessed major setbacks for al-Qaida in Iraq. Both the Bush administration and the terrorist leaders identified Iraq as the crucible of the world's struggle against Islamic terrorism. The apparent defeat of al-Qaida in Iraq, if it is followed up with unrelenting pressure, may trigger the same type of ideological chain reaction that doomed the Soviet Union by undermining the self confidence of the terrorists and the coherence of their alternative world.
Beside military success, defeating al-Qaida means discrediting fanaticism as a system of thought. All terrorist movements, even those that pretend to be "religious" are based on the absolutization of political goals, which become the focus of an entire moral and intellectual universe. This sanctification of politics gives terrorist groups their single-minded determination and atrocious cruelty. But it makes them vulnerable because it is unnatural and leaves them dependent on fantasies to justify their existence. The experience of Nazism and communism, the deprogramming of European terrorists and even the de-jihadization of religious extremists in Muslim countries shows that the faith of terrorists will break down when they are confronted with the falseness of their core beliefs.

Obama is trying to open a new chapter in our relations with the Muslim world. He seeks to do so, however, by pandering to that world's weaknesses rather than appealing to its strengths. There is nothing wrong with extending the hand of friendship but this should not be based on an effort to convince Muslims that the U.S. is not as bad as they think.

On the contrary, it should be done on the basis of complete frankness and the expectation that, in the final analysis, the Muslim world also has obligations to resist fanaticism and defend the benefits of civilization that we all share.

Interview by Andrea Bistrich: Karen Armstrong (3)

In addition, you have stressed the importance of a "triple vision"-the ability to view the conflict from the perspective of the Islamic, Jewish and Christian communities. Could you explain this view?

The three religions of Abraham -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- can and should be viewed as one religious tradition that went in three different directions. I have always tried to see them in this way; none is superior to any of the others. Each has its own particular genius; each its own particular flaws. Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God and share the same moral values. In the book A History of God, I tried to show that throughout their history, Jews, Christians and Muslims have asked the same kind of questions about God and have reached remarkably similar solutions-so that there are Jewish and Muslim versions of the incarnation, for example, and very similar notions of prophecy. In The Battle for God, I tried to show how similar the fundamentalist movements are in all three faiths.

Jews, however, have always found it difficult to accept the later faiths of Christianity and Islam; Christianity has always had an uneasy relationship with Judaism, the parent faith, and has seen Islam as a blasphemous imitation of revelation. The Qur'an, however, has a positive view of both Judaism and Christianity and constantly asserts that Muhammad did not come to cancel out the faiths of "the People of the Book": you cannot be a Muslim unless you also revere the prophets Abraham, David, Noah, Moses and Jesus-whom the Muslims regard as prophets-as in fact do many of the New Testament writers. Luke's gospel calls Jesus a prophet from start to finish; the idea that Jesus was divine was a later development, often misunderstood by Christians.

Unfortunately, however, religious people like to see themselves as having a monopoly on truth; they see that they alone are the one true faith. But this is egotism and has nothing to do with true religion, which is about the abandonment of the ego.

Too often it seems that religious people are not necessarily more compassionate, more tolerant, more peaceful or more spiritual than others. America, for example, is a very religious country, and at the same time it is the most unequal socially and economically. What does this say about the purpose of religion?

The world religions all insist that the one, single test of any type of religiosity is that it must issue in practical compassion. They have nearly all developed a version of the Golden Rule: "Do not do to others what you would not have done to you." This demands that we look into our own hearts, discover what it is that gives us pain and then refuse, under any circumstances, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Compassion demands that we "feel with" the other; that we dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there. This is the bedrock message of the Qur'an, of the New Testament ("I can have faith that moves mountains," says St. Paul, "but if I lack charity it profits me nothing."). Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, defined the Golden Rule as the essence of Judaism: everything else, he said, was "commentary." We have exactly the same teaching in Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism and Buddhism. I have tried to show this in one of my most recent books, The Great Transformation.

The traditions all insist that it is not enough simply to show compassion to your own group. You must have what the Chinese call jian ai, concern for everybody. Or as Jewish law puts it: "Honour the stranger." "Love your enemies," said Jesus: if you simply love your own kind, this is purely self-interest and a form of group egotism. The traditions also insist that it is the daily, hourly practice of compassion -not the adoption of the correct "beliefs" or the correct sexuality- that will bring us into the presence of what is called God, Nirvana, Brahman or the Dao. Religion is thus inseparable from altruism.

Interview : Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (6)

The 20th century was a century in which the Muslim world experienced the hands of the West in the perception of the Muslim world -- a dismantling of some of its important constructs. The most significant of that was the dismantling of the Ottoman caliph. Because for the first time in the collective consciousness of Muslims, there is no caliph anywhere. And it was replaced-- especially in major population centers of the Muslim world, those that were important at the turn at the beginning of the twentieth century: Turkey, Egypt, Iran -- the traditional forms of rulership were replaced by militantly secular regimes. Not only secular regimes, but militantly secular regimes, which did not even support traditional values which were cherished by the people. In Turkey, for instance, Ataturk himself forbade the calling of the prayer in the Arabic language. They changed the script of Ottoman Turkish from Arabic script to the Roman script.
So the Muslim world felt that there was a deliberate attempt to create a split in that bond which Muslims had. ... So what happened created a split between Arabs and Turks ... and refigured the map and created new identities of people.
People [had] thought of themselves as part of a group. You had the family, the clan, the tribe and extended notion of a tribe, a people, a nation. So for example the Uzbekis were split geographically. So you have some Uzbekis in Uzbekistan, some in what we call Afghanistan.
The Pashtun people were split: some in Pakistan, some in Afghanistan. The Hazaris were split between Iran and Afghanistan. We tell these people, this segment of Uzbekis, Pashtuns and Hazaris, now think of yourself as a completely new identification based upon geography, which people did not have before. And this seeded conflict. ...
We did the same thing in Iraq, and the Kurds lost out. They are split between Iraq and Turkey. So the West planted the seed for some grave problems in the Muslim world. But at the same time, they robbed the Muslim world in the minds of the Muslims, from a sense of identity that was based upon people, and also a sense of pluralism that existed within the Muslim dialectic. So within, let's say, the Ottoman caliphate, they had a principle of different peoples.
So they had the notion that the sultan had political power over these different people. But these peoples had their different cultural norms, different religions. They had their different religious leaders, as long as political homage was paid to the sultan, and they didn't act in a way which was treasonous politically. They had their own court system, dealing with matters of religious affairs and so forth.
All was part of this of this grouping of people. So we had a method of pluralism which worked, which was successful. And there were instances of intermarriage between the people and so forth, but people lived harmoniously. It created what Samuel Huntington calls "torn societies."... Samuel Huntington describes a torn society as "a society whose leadership, those who hold the reins of the power, identify with a different set of cultural norms than the people on whom they govern."

And what would be the key implications that came of this fracturing, tearing apart, in the way Islam has been lived?

I think the major thing is that Muslims have been taught to think in certain ideas that are peculiarly Western -- the idea of nationalism, the idea of nation states. And in their attempt to fulfill their natural urge to perfect themselves as Muslims individually and collectively, they therefore try to create some peculiar hybrids.
Like the notion of an Islamic state, for instance. Several generations of Muslims now have been educated in ways that their mindset and ways of thinking, if not their language even, is very much Westernized. So they think in terms of Western ideas and concepts, even if they speak their own native languages.
So the urge therefore to develop an Islamic nation-state -- a concept which some people may regard as being an oxymoron, because the nation-state is not something which developed out of the Islamic tradition ... that the Islamic philosophical tradition was based upon identification of grouping of peoples, who had governed themselves according to living in certain ways and structured in a slightly different way. ...

There seems to be a growing conservatism, or conservative interpretation of Islam taking hold. Is that something you have seen, or agree with?
I think that in the 20th century there are certain waves that occurred. There was, at one point in time, a feeling -- in fact, when you go back to the first part of the twentieth century, there were some well-known voices who grew out of Islamic tradition but who were exposed to the West ... who felt the need to restate what it means to be a Muslim in the 20th century. They found many aspects of Western society to be highly admirable, and wanted to bring it to their own countries.
In fact, in the 1920s the Wafd party was founded in Egypt to introduce democracy into Egypt. And the Wafd party had on its platform Egyptians -- not only Egyptian Muslims but Egyptian Jews and Egyptian ... Christians from the Coptic Church on the platform.
So there was an attempt to meld the best of the of the East with the best of the West. These movements ... were interrupted by events of World War II and the rise of militant dictatorial regimes, which completely changed the sociological complexion, the political complexion of much of the Muslim world. During that period of time, I would say 1950s and 1960s, there was a time when these regimes had the upper hand. And they felt that the way to fast-forward as societies, in terms of the industrial development, was to emulate the West in all of its aspects.
Their policies didn't succeed. And this resulted in a reaction to much of these policies, because this newfangled way of doing things didn't work. Let's go back and revisit our traditions, and let's find comfort in those traditions. ...

Could you just explain to us the key things that Islam, Christianity and Judaism have in common -- what they share?

They share geography. They share Jerusalem, which is important to all. We share a common ancestor, Abraham, who was really the founder and the patriarch of all of us. And I think if we can revert back to the Abrahamic foundation, that is [where] we will find our common ground. Our languages are very similar -- Arabic and Hebrew and Aramaic ... . The ideas are very similar; and the fundamental impulse of belief in God, that God is the creator, that we are obliged to act in a way that is ethical and just and right. These are certainly among the important aspects of kinship between these three faith traditions. And I would even go further and say -- apart perhaps from some differences in the notion of God -- but as far as the idea of the common good, the idea of social justice -- [that] is shared with all faith traditions.
Source : Frontline : Muslims

Laws of Partnership in Islam

If two persons make an agreement that they would trade with the goods jointly owned by them, and would divide the profit between themselves, and if they pronounce a formula declaring partnership, in Arabic or in any other language, or express their intention of becoming each other's partner by conduct, the partnership will be valid. If some persons enter into a partnership to share the wages from their labour, like, if a few barbers or labourers agree mutually that they would divide between themselves whatever wages they earn, that partnership is not in order. But if they enter into a mutual compromise that, say, half of what one earns will be given to the other, for a fixed period, in exchange of half of what the other earns, this transaction will be valid, and thus each will be a partner in the wages of the other. If two persons enter into a partnership, on the terms that each of them would purchase the commodity on his own responsibility, and each would be responsible for the payment of its price, but would share the profit which they earn from that commodity, that partnership is not valid. However, if each of them makes the other his agent, authorising that whatever one purchases on credit, the other will be a partner in it, which means that he and his partner are responsible for the debt, then they will be considered partners in that commodity.
The persons who become partners under the rules of partnership, must be adult and sane, and should have intention and free volition for becoming partners. They should also be able to exercise discretion over their properties. Hence, if a feeble-minded person who spends his wealth impudently, enters into partnership, it is not in order, because such a person has no right of disposal over his property. If a condition is laid down in an agreement of partnership, that the partner who manages, or does more work than the other partner, or does more important work than the other, will get larger share of the profit, it is necessary that he should be given his share as agreed upon. Similarly, if it is agreed that the person who does not manage, or does not do more work, or does not do more important work, will get larger share of the profit, that condition is also valid and it must be fulfilled. If it is agreed that the entire profit will be appropriated by one person, or the entire loss will be borne by one of them, that sort of partnership is a matter of Ishkal. If it is not agreed that one of the partners will receive more profit, and if the investment of each of them is equal, they must share profit and loss equally. And if their investment is not equal, they should divide the profit and loss in proportion to their capital. For example, if two persons become partners, and the capital of one of them is double the capital of the other, his share in the profit and loss will also be double of the other, irrespective of whether both of them do equal work, or one of them does less work, or does not work at all. If it is laid down in the agreement of partnership, that both the partners will buy and sell together, or each of them will conclude transactions individually, or only one of them will conclude transactions, or a third party will be hired to conclude the transaction, they should act as agreed upon. If it is not specified as to which of the partners will buy and sell with the capital, neither of them can conclude any transactions with that capital without the permission of the other.
The partner who has been given the right of discretion over the capital, should act according to the agreement of partnership. For example, if it is agreed that he will purchase on credit, or will sell against cash payment, or will purchase the property from a particular place, he should act according to the agreement. However, if no such agreement is made with him, he should conclude transactions in the usual manner, and carry on in such a way that no loss is suffered in the partnership. He should not carry any property belonging to the partnership, with him while he is travelling, if that is unusual. If a partner who transacts business with the capital of the partnership, sells and purchases things contrary to the agreement made with him, or concludes transactions in a manner which is not normal, because of the absence of any agreement, the transaction made by him in both the cases will be correct and valid; but if such a transaction results in a loss, or a part of wealth is squandered, then the partner who has acted against the agreement, or the usual norm, will be responsible for the loss. If a partner who trades with the capital of the partnership, does not go beyond the bounds of his authority, nor is he negligent in looking after the capital, yet unexpectedly the entire capital or a part of it perishes, he is not responsible. If a partner who trades with the capital of the partnership, declares that the capital has perished, and if other partners trust him, they should accept his word. But if they do not trust him, they can complain against him before the Mujtahid, who will decide the case according to Islamic laws.
If all the partners withdraw the permission, given by them to one another, for the right of discretion over their respective shares held in partnership, none of them will be allowed the right of discretion over them. And if one of them withdraws the permission accorded by him, the other partners do not have the right of discretion; but one who has withdrawn his permission can exercise his right of discretion over the property of the partnership. If one of the partners demands that the capital invested in the partnership should be divided, others should accept his demand even if the period fixed for the partnership may not have expired yet, except when the division of the capital entails considerable loss to the partners. If one of the partners dies, or becomes insane, or unconscious, other partners cannot continue to exercise right of discretion over investment held in the partnership. And the same rule applies when one of them becomes feeble-minded that is, spends his property without any consideration.
If a partner purchases a thing on credit for himself, its profit and loss belongs to him. However, if he purchases it for partnership, and if the agreement allows credit dealings, its profit and loss belongs to both of them. If the partners conclude a transaction with a joint capital investment, and it transpires later that the partnership was invalid, if the validity of the transaction was not dependent on mutual consent, meaning that, if they had known that the partnership was not valid, they would have still been agreeable to having the right of discretion over the property or stock of each other, the transaction will be considered valid, and whatever is gained or lost from the transaction will be shared by them. But if the partners would not have been disposed to agree to exercise discretion over each others' stock or property had they known that the partnership was not valid, yet they approve the particular transaction, it will be valid - and if they do not, it will be invalid. And in either case, if any partner has worked for the partnership without the previous intention to work gratis, he can collect the wages for his services at the usual rate, considering the percentage of other partners. But if the usual wage is more than his share of dividend, after having agreed to the validity of the transaction, he should take the dividend only.